Saturday, 18 May 2013

“Toil without
song is like a weary journey without an end.” - H. P. Lovecraft

Well, another
Eurovision contest is over with Denmark gaining the first prize. The song is
typical Eurovision material, with Emmelie De Forest performing “Only Teardrops”,
singing in English, of course. English has become the “official” world language
and Europe has adopted it with a vengeance, especially where Eurovision is
concerned. The lure of international success in the big markets of the Anglophone
countries is too great to ignore. A country has to be very brave to sing a song
in Eurovision in its own language – and bravo to all of those do sing thus. The
singer, who looks very beautiful, struggles to sing, I think, especially in the
lower register.

The only
concession to a differentiation from the standard “pop” material is the
accompaniment, which contains the fife and drums of battle, in reference to the
spat between lovers described in the song. The song could have been deeper if
there was a pointed reference to a war, contrasting it with the first part, giving
it much more relevance to current world situations (and justifying more the
fife and drums):

Friday, 17 May 2013

“When you cut
that eggplant up and you roast it in the oven and you make the tomato sauce and
you put it on top, your soul is in that food, and there’s something about that
that can never be made by a company that has three million employees.” - Mario Batali

It has been a
rather busy week, as one that involves travel away from home always is.
Nevertheless, it is good to be home now and be able to enjoy some home cooking.
Travel is a welcome change sometimes, but one does get tired of eating at
hotels and restaurants day after day. What better than a Vegetarian Eggplant
and Zucchini Bake?

Brush both sides
of eggplant and zucchini slices generously with oil. Grill eggplant and
zucchini, in batches, for 2 minutes each side or until charred and tender.
Remove to a plate. Brush with oil.

Place one-third
of the eggplant over base of dish. Top with one-third of the pasta sauce,
basil, parmesan and bocconcini. Repeat layers twice with remaining zucchini
alternately with eggplant, sauce, basil, parmesan and bocconcini.

Top with
breadcrumbs mixed with grated parmesan. Spray with oil. Bake, uncovered, for 25
to 30 minutes or until bubbling around the edges and golden. Stand for 10
minutes. Serve.

Thursday, 16 May 2013

“A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.” – Aristotle

The central business district of Perth is bounded by the Swan River to the south and east, with Kings Park on the western end, while the railway reserve formed a northern border. A state and federally funded project named Perth City Link involves the sinking of a section of the railway line, in addition to the sinking of an existing above-ground bus terminal as well as riverside development, known as Elizabeth Quay.

St Georges Terrace is the prominent street of the area with 1.3 million m² of office space in the CBD. Hay Street and Murray Street have most of the retail and entertainment facilities. The tallest building in the city is Central Park, which is the seventh tallest building in Australia. The CBD has recently been the centre of a mining-induced boom, with several commercial and residential projects due for completion, including a 244 m office building for Australian/British mining company BHP Billiton.

Perth’s growth and relative prosperity, especially since the mid-1960s, has resulted from its role as the main service centre for the state’s resource industries, which produce gold, iron ore, nickel, alumina, diamonds, mineral sands, coal, oil, and natural gas. Whilst most mineral and petroleum production takes place elsewhere in the state, the non-base services provide most of the employment and income to the people of Perth.

Fremantle, in Western Australia, is a remarkable city. In the past decade, especially, Fremantle has become one of the great tourist attractions in the Perth area, boasting many interesting historic buildings, gracious hotels, extensive seaside parks and enough tourist attractions to make it the ideal day-out destination. It is a perfect place for having a picnic in a park by the seaside, or a meal in one of Fremantle’s excellent restaurants. One may visit the museums, gaze at the conspicuous wealth of the Fremantle Yacht Club, explore the five heritage trails, investigate the Fremantle markets or go fishing at North Mole.

The city is located at the mouth of the Swan River and Fremantle Harbour serves as the port of Perth, the state capital. Fremantle was the first area settled by the Swan River colonists in 1829. It was declared a city in 1929, and has a population of approximately 25,000. The city is named after Captain Charles Howe Fremantle, the English naval officer who had pronounced possession of Western Australia and who established a camp at the site. The city contains well-preserved 19th-century buildings and other heritage features. The Western Australian vernacular diminutive for Fremantle is "Freo".

Tuesday, 14 May 2013

“No one realises
how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his
old, familiar pillow.” Lin Yutang

I am in Perth for
a few days for work and things are going quite well. All is complemented by
some splendid autumn weather – brilliant, sun-filled days with the temperature hovering
around the mid 20s Celsius, while the nights are cool and perfect for a comfortable
sleep. Nevertheless, it will be good to return home…

Perth is the
capital of Western Australia, which is the nation’s largest state. Its superb
position on the banks of the beautiful Swan River and nearby hectares of
natural bushland in Kings Park make for a city centred on the great outdoors.
The magnificent Swan River that winds its way through the City, is lined by
grassy parklands. One can enjoy a picnic or a barbeque and watch the sunset and
city come alive with light. Many visitors hire a kayak, bike or sailboat to
explore the river’s quiet reaches.

A Swan River
cruise can be booked from Barrack Square which will take the visitor to the
bustling port city of Fremantle or east to the Swan Valley Wine Region. One can
also jump on a ferry for a short trip across the river to South Perth. The Swan
River also provides for action lovers, with water sports available right in the
heart of the city. Such activities are especially glorious in Perth city, with
the shining brilliance of towering city buildings set as a stunning backdrop to
the dazzling waters of the Swan.

The jewel in the
city’s crown is Kings Park, one of the largest inner city parks in the world.
Located within a short walk of the city, it is a major draw-card for both
visitors to Perth and locals alike. This stunning location overlooks the city
and the bright blue waters of the Swan River. From high above, you can see the
brilliantly coloured sails of boats on the river, the twinkling lights of the
city, the distant Perth Hills and the endless blue skies for which Perth is so
renowned.

Views from the
DNA Tower in Forrest Drive are similarly breathtaking - on a clear day you can
see all the way to the Indian Ocean. The park features both cultivated gardens
and untamed bushland and you can picnic on grassy lawns, take a jog through the
bushland or attend one of the summer outdoor concerts under the stars. Children
are also catered for with a number of excellent playgrounds suitable for
children of all ages.

Monday, 13 May 2013

At the weekend
we watched an interesting film from Turkey. One of the advantages of living in
a multicultural city like Melbourne is that one may easily find products from
many distant homelands, and that includes the stuff of entertainment and
culture: DVDs, CDs, magazines, books, art, etc. Brunswick, an inner suburb of
Melbourne, has a high proportion of Turkish-Australians, and there are many
Turkish shops in this suburb. We bought a few Turkish movies with English
subtitles at the Brunswick Market and the film we watched at the weekend was a
very good one.

It was Director
Murat Saraçoglu’s 2009 film “Deli Deli Olma” (“Crazy Occurrences” - English
title given as “Piano Girl”),
with a screenplay by Hazel Sevim Unsal, and starring Tarik Akan, Şerif Sezer, Çagla
Acar, Deniz Arna. The movie combines humour and pathos, history and tradition,
old and new, and weaves several stories together, giving a picture of life in
Eşme Yazı, a small village close to the Eastern Anatolian city of Kars in
Northeastern Turkey.

After the Russo-Turkish
War of 1877–1878, Molokans (a Christian sect) were forced into exile by Czarist
Russia. Molokans were regarded as heretics by the Russian Orthodox Church and
were named Molokans (milk-drinkers) because they drank milk on most of the
fasting days in the church year in Eastern Christianity, something that
Orthodox people eschew. The film traces the final years of Mishka (Tarık Akan),
the last Russian Molokan in the village. Although the film is set in modern
times, the village is so poor and remote that it seems as though we are looking
back in time, with all of the old traditions, way of life and prejudices still
at large.

The village
people call the Molokan “yeke kişi” (i.e. “big man”), and certainly with his imposing
height, long, white beard and hair, he looks like a patriarch and is well-liked
by almost everyone in the village. Papuç (Şerif Sezer) is a short-tempered and
cantankerous old woman who seems to terrify everyone. She alone seems to hate
Mishka and wants him to leave, even after being there all his life. Papuç lives
with her son Şemistan (Levent Tülek) the village grocer, his wife Figan (Zuhal
Topal) and her three grandchildren. The youngest grandchild Alma (Cemile Nihan
Turhan) is a plucky but tender-hearted girl who spends a lot of her time with
Mishka, even though it is against her grandmother’s wishes.

One day Şemistan
gives Mishka some flour and tea on credit. When Popuç discovers this, she makes
life hell for her son, demanding that he make Mishka pay his debt. Mishka, although
penniless decides to pay his debt to Şemistan by giving him his piano, an
heirloom inherited from his father, who brought it from Russia. Part of the
reason Mishka gives the piano to Şemistan is that Alma is musically talented
and she wants to learn to play it. Alma is encouraged by the village teacher
Metin (Korel Cezayirli) who has noticed that Alma has an ear for music and he want
to convince her family to allow her to take the conservatory exam.

The
villagers, however, are a little scared of the piano (“the devil’s machine”!)
and use the instrument as a means to pay debts - whoever owes some money to
someone else gives the piano as payment. Ultimately the piano ends up with Mishka
again… However, there is also a lot of mystery and some unfinished stories from
the past that eventually are uncovered and bring the film to its moving
conclusion.

The acting in
the movie is excellent and the two leads, Şerif Sezer and Tarık Akan, make the
movie. The two children actors Cemile Nihan and Ozan Erdoğan consistently steal
scenes and it certainly looks as though they shall have a career in movies. The
direction and cinematography are well executed and the music running throughout
the film almost as a counter-plot, is appropriate and suits the mood admirably.
The vignettes of village life and the trials and tribulations of the Molokan
refugees are intriguing, but the story is mainly about human relationships and the
coming of age tale of Alma. The film is poignant and funny, touching and
entertaining. It involved us from beginning to end and we can recommend it most
highly.

Sunday, 12 May 2013

“Just as in
earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth
their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the
mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.”
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Søren_Kierkegaard

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí Y Domenech
(born May 11, 1904, Figueras, Spain - died Jan. 23, 1989, Figueras), or Salvador
Dalí as he is commonly known, was a Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker,
influential for his innovative explorations of subconscious imagery in art. His
father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict
disciplinary approach was countered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrés, who
encouraged her son's artistic endeavours. When he was five, Dalí was taken to
his brother's grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's
reincarnation, a concept which he came to believe.

Of his brother, Dalí said,
“...we resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different
reflections. He was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much
in the absolute.” Images of his long-dead brother would reappear embedded in
his later works, including “Portrait of My Dead Brother” (1963). Dalí also had
a sister, Ana María, who was three years younger. In 1949, she published a book
about her brother, “Dalí As Seen By His Sister”. Dalí attended drawing school.
In 1916, Dalí also discovered modern painting on a summer vacation trip to
Cadaqués with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips
to Paris. The next year, Dalí’s father organised an exhibition of his charcoal
drawings in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the
Municipal Theater in Figueras in 1919.

As an art student in Madrid and
Barcelona, Dalí assimilated a vast number of artistic styles and displayed
unusual technical facility as a painter. It was not until the late 1920s,
however, that two events brought about the development of his mature artistic
style: His discovery of Sigmund Freud’s writings on the erotic significance of
subconscious imagery, and his affiliation with the Paris Surrealists, a group of
artists and writers who sought to establish the “greater reality” of man’s
subconscious over his reason. To bring up images from his subconscious mind,
Dalí began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described
as “paranoiac critical”.

Once Dalí hit on this method, his
painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he
produced the paintings which made him the world’s best-known Surrealist artist.
He depicted a dream world in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed,
deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion. Dalí
portrayed these objects in meticulous, almost painfully realistic detail and
usually placed them within bleak, sunlit landscapes that were reminiscent of
his Catalonian homeland. Perhaps the most famous of these enigmatic images is
“The Persistence of Memory” (1931), in which limp, melting watches rest in an
eerily calm landscape. With the Spanish director Luis Buñuel, Dalí also made
two Surrealistic films – “Un Chien andalou” (1928; An Andalusian Dog) and “L’
Âge d’ or” (1930; The Golden Age) - that are similarly filled with grotesque
but highly suggestive images.

In the late 1930s Dalí switched to
painting in a more academic style under the influence of the Renaissance
painter Raphael, and as a consequence he was expelled from the Surrealist
movement. Thereafter he spent much of his time designing theatre sets,
interiors of fashionable shops, and jewellery, as well as exhibiting his genius
for flamboyant self-promotional stunts in the United States, where he lived
from 1940 to 1955. In the period from 1950 to 1970 Dalí painted many works with
religious themes, though he continued to explore erotic subjects, to represent
childhood memories, and to use themes centring on his wife, Gala.
Notwithstanding their technical accomplishments, these later paintings are not
as highly regarded as the artist's earlier works. The most interesting and
revealing of Dalí's books is “The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí” (1942–44).

Since its purchase
in 1956 by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, “The Sacrament of the
Last Supper” (167-268 cm - 1955) shown above, it has become the museum’s
most popular work. The popularity of Dalí’s image has persisted despite
critical hostility toward the painting and the gallery’s own ambivalence. It
hangs in a corner by the elevators. Theologians, like the Protestants Francis
Schaeffer and Paul Tillich, have also weighed in. For Schaeffer, Dalí’s image
was a clear example of Christian meaning being lost to a vague existentialism:
“This intangible Christ which Dalí painted is in sharp contrast to the bodies
of the apostles who are physically solid in the picture. Dalí explained in his
interviews that he had found a mystical meaning for life in the fact that
things are made up of energy rather than solid mass. Because of this, for him
there was a reason for a vault into an area of non-reason to give him the hope
of meaning.”

Dalí was excited
by the possibilities of expressing mystical ideas in light of new visions of
reality made possible by nuclear physics. He dismissed the “science versus
religion” dichotomy, noting “not a single philosophic, moral, aesthetic or
biological discovery allows the denial of God.” His Surrealist art had been
dominated by Freudian motifs, but from then on, his art would take on the
Christian heritage in its content and depth. Dalí began to explore a mystical
edge of Christianity that had been particularly challenged by a sterile view of
modern science.

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WELCOME

Welcome to Nicholas V's Blog on Blogger

I have been blogging daily on this platform for several years now. It is surprising that I have persisted as the world is changing and "microblogging" is now the norm. I blog to amuse myself, make comment on current affairs, externalise some of my creativity, keep notes on things that interest me, learn something new and to surprise myself with things that I discover about this wonderful, and sometimes crazy, world we live in.

I sometimes get the impression that I am on a soapbox delivering a monologue, so your comments are welcome.